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This is the first in a series of articles on the tribunal hearings on Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in West Bengal.

The Supreme Court had directed the creation of Appellate Tribunals in West Bengal on March 10, 2026.

The apex court made the ruling while hearing proceedings initiated by Mostari Banu, a 44-year-old homemaker from a remote village at Bhagwangola in Murshidabad who filed the first legal challenge against the Election Commission of India (ECI)’s  Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise in West Bengal. The premise was that removal from the roll would not be final. A person wrongly struck off would have somewhere to go.

Twenty-seven lakh people were entitled to use that mechanism. On the commission’s own adjudication return, 27,16,393 electors were found not eligible by judicial officers and removed. Every one of them had a right of appeal.

About seven lakh used this right.

The figure was given to the Supreme Court 168 days after the tribunals were ordered into existence. Senior counsel Gopal Sankaranarayanan told the bench that of the roughly 38 lakh appeals sitting before the tribunals, only about seven lakh had been filed by people seeking restoration.

The rest were challenges to other people’s inclusion, filed by the commission itself and by private objectors. The commission has not disputed the division. The court has ordered it to produce a category-wise account of its own.

That leaves 20,16,393 people, 74.23% of everyone removed by adjudication, who did not go to a tribunal at all.

The last row is not a fourth group. 

The 75,443 restored are drawn from the seven lakh who appealed, not from the 27 lakh as a whole. They are 2.78% of everyone found not eligible and 10.78% of those who actually asked. The rest of the seven lakh are still waiting. The 20 lakh who never appealed are not even being considered here.

One caveat belongs with the........

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